Problem with failed backup that keeps pending

[Daan van den Berg]

Hi,

this is my first post here, and I couldn't find a topic that handled this specific problem so hope this is not a repost.

A client of ours has a problem with his backup. They have a HP tapestreamer working with Data Protector Express (newest version with updates). They make a backup every day (Monday, Tuesday, etc) when the office is closed. Each day they are supposed to take out the old tape and insert the next one. But sometimes this is forgotten (or the person that should do it is not at the office). So the Monday job is waiting for a new tape, but it isn't in the streamer yet. It keeps pending and pending until a tape is found. Whenever someone inserts the tape, it starts running. The problem is that this might happen on a moment where the next job should run. So the Monday job replaces the Tuesday job, and that one cannot find a tape either and everything goes wrong. This can be reset without much trouble, but our client misses a lot of backups this way.

My question:
Is it possible to cancel a job if it didn't run in time? For example, if no medium is found for let's say 7 hours after the job should start, can I choose to kill the job, so when the next day everything goes on without trouble? I couldn't find a function like that so I wondered if it's even there.

Thanks in advance!

[D Lancaster]

The feature you have described has been requested by others and is not currently available in the product. It is being considered for future releases but there are no specific plans at this time.

One possible work around it to add email notification to the backup job. This would at least notify someone that the tape wasn't changed and reduce the delay in getting the problem from sever days to a single day.

Another possible work around would be to use the new "Daily Append" rotation scheme in Version 3.5 SP2. This rotation does a full backup on one day a week followed by incremental backups on the other days that are appended to the same tape. This reduces the tape changes to once a week, assuming you can fit a full backup and 4 incrementals in a single tape.

DL